Flint now knows where 4,000 lead service lines are, but records for 11,000+ homes missing

Flint's old paper records have been transformed into a digital database to help identify where the city's lead service lines are.

Credit Steve Carmody / Michigan Radio

Flint’s mayor and others want to replace all the lead service lines in the city. Besides the cost, there’s been one huge hurdle: Flint doesn’t know where its lead service lines are.

Until now, those records have lived on 3-by-5 index cards, old maps, and in the minds of Flint water department employees.

Experts at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus spent the past few weeks poring over those records and putting them into a much more useful, digital database. They’ve finished their work and handed the new database to city leaders.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Flint campus have taken Flint’s old records and digitized them.

Marty Kaufman, a U of M Flint professor who chairs the school’s Department of Earth and Resource Science, has helped lead the effort.

He says we know now, for instance, that there are at least 4,300 water service lines made at least partially of lead. Plus, now we know what we don’t know: that there are at least 11,000 homes in Flint with water service lines that are still a mystery.

Here’s how Kaufman breaks down the numbers:

56,254 total parcels in the city of Flint

25,974 parcels with copper service lines

13,179 “unknown” type of service lines

Roughly 13,000 galvanized or “other” service lines

4,376 parcels with a lead section in the service line (118 of these are completely made of lead)

The 13,179 parcels with an “unknown” type of service line include a bunch of very large and very tiny parcels. Kaufman’s team figures these parcels are “typically places where no residence would exist.” When those are eliminated, Kaufman estimates there are 11,196 residential property parcels with unknown service line connections.

Figuring out which homes in Flint have lead service lines is vital to resolving the Flint water crisis. Researchers need to test the water in those homes to see when the lead in water risk has declined.

“That’s a fairly simple test but it should be done by a professional,” he said.

Using a magnet, these professionals should be able to go into a person’s home, find part of the service line, and run a brief test on it.

Officials with the Environmental Protection Agency say that test can be helpful in showing what type of material the line is made of coming into a person’s home. But, they say that material may not be consistent all the way out to the water main. That’s because a homeowner technically owns the water service line from a city’s easement in front of their home to the house, but not from the easement to the water main. Partial water service line replacements are not entirely uncommon.

What would you do if your tap water turned brown? If it gave your children a rash every time they took a bath? Or worse, what if it made them sick? Listen to our special documentary below, and hear the wild story about how the water in Flint became Not Safe To Drink.

A team of people at University of Michigan’s Flint campus is almost done converting old, paper records into digital records that show which homes have lead service lines. The team has been working on it for a couple of weeks now, and should have the information by the end of this week.

In Flint today, top scientists from all three University of Michigan campuses met to discuss future research into the city’s drinking water crisis.

U of M is putting up $100,000 in seed money to help get the research started. University President Mark Schlissel is encouraging scientists from Dearborn and Ann Arbor, as well as Flint, to see what kinds of research opportunities might be worth pursuing in the wake of the crisis.

U of M-Flint Chancellor Sue Borrego says now’s the time to coordinate work being conducted on Flint’s lead-tainted tap water.

Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality is asking Flint for data that would show where the city’s lead service lines are. People living in homes hooked to lead service lines have a higher risk of being exposed to lead in drinking water.

Under federal rules, those homes are supposed to be sampled to help determine how well a water system is doing in keeping lead out of the water. But Flint doesn’t necessarily know where those homes are.